Cherry scones

A friend invited me for coffee this morning. As we arrived, she was still rubbing her fingers free of doughy gloves and the smell of baking cherry scones hung about her busy kitchen, spilling fragrant through the open door into a wintered garden. "Drop by for coffee, I'll make scones," I say it out loud to see how it sounds. Unconvincing, in my case. She, on the other hand, knocks out a warm batch of home baked treats with the same nonchalance as I swill a crystal glass of cool and gooseberry-tanged chablis.

Some friendships you keep for a life. Others for only a train-ride. Some friends you lose and never know why and when you are old, you think: "Whatever happened to?" or "What did I do?". Some friends you mourn; some walk away and you do not notice. This friendship is spring green and sweetly brief, lasting weeks. Now my new friend is about to move somewhere bouncing hot and sandy to feed oily egg and cigarette thin chips to fat Englishmen who would prefer to eat their egg and chips at home. I want to say to her: "Don't go out of my life. You have only just arrived there." But in her head, she has already quit this place for a different tomorrow.

As I drink the coffee and graze on blossom-coloured cake, I gaze at the bonfire of trucks and old jeans piled up on her dining room carpet, salvaged from the rooms upstairs. Each of her four boys is allowed one black plastic bag of toys to tote with him into his new and sunnier life. One final boy is missing - her oldest. Seven years ago, she lost him. Just 13, he slipped through her floury fingers in one of those "Dear God" disasters that make you catch your breath. Mowing early summer grass and daisies, he cut the lead. Zap. A boy-child. I have seen his face smiling out of a sharp school photograph and in his mother's eyes, you can see him yet.

They are packing for the sun and a fresh start. I admire her determination that the four remaining boys will run from school bench straight into a warm and salty sea, nylon homework bags, spray-wet and abandoned on the beach. But I will miss her. She is a new friend and no one else will make me pastries and froth my coffee. While she was packing, she found bed treasures her missing boy once slept with, his teddy bear and a keepsake velvet cushion. In a suitcase at the top of a wardrobe, she found his summer coat, its pocket packet rustling, the crisps long gone. Prawn cocktail. She slipped the packet back into the coat and the coat into a bag to carry with her.

It's a free country

When I turned on my computer this morning, my hands went cold at the thought of people I didn't call Aunty, reading my blog. I never knew fear did that to you. I should have made pastry. Thankyou very much to anyone kind enough to leave a comment - even the slightly mean ones. Better out than in, as they say. Up to now, I haven't had to reply to any comments because I haven't had any readers - apart from Aunty (sorry about that hottub story by the way Aunty.) It is probably breaking blogger etiquette to reply to the comments on an actual post but until I figure it all out - just for today:
1.*My recipe (rather than one snatched from the net)for chocolate rice crispy cake.
Buy rice crispies. Tell the boys to put back the cheesey quavers, blackcurrant fruitshoot and 17 comics complete with 17 unnecessary toys sellotaped to the front cover. Ignore wails of "But I really wanted one of those." Stand in queue at local supermarket. Think up 53 retorts to the hatchet-faced shop assistant I always get, who seems to have taken a personal dislike to my children. Pay with a £20 note just to irritate her. Leave the shop. Return.
*Buy very organic and expensive chocolate. Hope not to get hatchet-faced assistant. Fail to recall any one of the 53 retorts when she looms up behind the till and snarls at the four-year-old for standing on the conveyor belt with a shopping basket on his head.
*Return home. Realise six-year-old has technically shoplifted the quavers. Turn on TV for the children. Make cup of tea. Eat large amount of chocolate and bag of cheesey quavers. Feel slightly sick.
*Break hypnotic spell of Scooby Doo to drag children into kitchen for mummy time. This, after all, is why I quit the day-job. Explain empty quavers packet away to small and accusatory inch-high private eyes.
*Melt chocolate.
*Allow four-year-old to pour in box of rice crispies.
*Realise this was a mistake.
*Clean up half a box of rice crispies from floor, kitchen surface, top of the oven and room upstairs that we never go in.
*Allow both boys to stir concoction with wooden spoon.
*Tell boys that hitting each with a wooden spoon is a bad thing to do.
*Realise there are no bun cases in the house
*Drive to supermarket for buncases. Hope not to get surly assistant. Give her £50 note. Smile sweetly.
*Return home. Scoop gungy spoonfuls of crisping chocolate gore into bun cases.
*Carry over to fridge with immense pride.
*Wash baby thoroughly.
(My recipe for pastry before anyone asks me for it is similar but less chocolatey.)
2.My reasons for agreeing to move to Northumberland (which I have apparently failed to explain adequately to anyone at all, including myself. This is probably as good enough time as any to do it.)
Love, simply. Mine for my husband and my husband's for this bleak and beautiful placeland. I do not know whether he realises quite how difficult it has been. I hope he does not really. I do not want him to think that I am being a martyr, all bloody and limbless. I agreed to come because he wanted it so desperately and I thought I should be willing to try something new. There aren't many laughs in that are there?
3. My voting intentions.
Iain Dale kindly linked to me on his fascinating pages and suggested in his comment I might like to vote Tory in thanks to him rather than Labour in tribute to Tom Watson who linked to me first. I had been thinking Tom could play Carlo Ponti to my Sophia Loren in the movie. Then I realised Ponti was dead? So maybe not.
This is an interesting one, because I think I am probably just the demographic David Cameron wants to vote for his party. Grateful though I am to Iain Dale and much as I would love to make it onto his blogroll, I have to be honest, Berwick upon Tweed is a Liberal Democrat constituency. Alan Beith, MP has 53% of the electorate and a majority of more than 8,500. He spends his entire life trying to dual the deathtrap known as the A1 so that post offices can travel up and down to Edinburgh in safety. That is when he is not trying to stop the RAF spooking the foxes and telling the barboured countryfolk they have a right to hunt cows. All in all, I do not think a Tory vote from me would count for that much. Sorry about that Iain. I am also slightly uneasy about the blogging equivalent of a casting couch but since my new-found happiness in Blogland is at stake, I am willing in principle, if enough readers are at stake, to vote for both Labour and Iain Dale's party - although that would mean voting twice. Perhaps I could move to Birmingham.Wife in the Midlands? Hmm.